We went on vacation to Yellowstone National Park.
The first day it was cold. . .And then it rained.
The second day it was cold. . .and rainy.
And then the third day happened.
I grew up in Washington; Western Washington. It rains a lot. I’m used to it, or at least I used to be. I’m not sure any more. We realized our current family tent is definitely a summer tent. After the drowning first day we added an after market rain fly.
But, the park was beautiful that second day, and maybe the rain kept some of the crowds away.
The third day dawned clear and cold. The dew was heavy enough to have masqueraded as the remnants of yet another mountain storm had the peaceful night’s sleep with no rain pounding on the tarp, not belayed the thought.
I quietly started getting things ready for another camping breakfast of bacon, eggs and pancakes. In bear country all food and cooking gear must be stowed each night. The morning ritual included dragging the stove, propane tank, coolers, food and utensils out of the bear proof van before any actual cooking could occur.
As I assembled my stove and hooked up the fuel, I happened to glance through the trees toward the lake. And I realized that the previous rain soaked days were worth it if it brought us today.
The sunlight filtered through the swirling mist. A crane lazily lifted off the water to disappear into the foggy reaches. I stood transfixed by the beauty of the living post card I had stumbled into.
I reveled in being in the right place at the right time.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
Tell your friends about this!
The greying sky let me know the unseen sun had bested the horizon. The birds were providing a multi-voiced chorus for my early morning hike through the Rocky Mountain west of Yellowstone park.
I’m an early riser. Nowhere is that more enjoyable than when camping in the mountains. We are on a family vacation with my wife’s sisters and their families. We had kids sleeping in tents and in vehicles, so I couldn’t start getting breakfast ready without waking my son. All the food was in the vehicles.
I decided to take the opportunity for a hike. The trail through the campground led to a dirt road that serviced a collection of summer cabins. Walking out to the main road I decided to loop back around to this campground entrance.
My boots crunched on the fine gravel that made up the dirt road. The previous night’s rain was collected in small easily avoided puddles. My walking stick added an offbeat third step as my footsteps disturbed the tranquility of the mountain quiet. I heard geese announcing their arrival at the lake, visible through lodgepole pines.
It was quiet. So quiet I easily heard the THUMP off in the forest to my right and slightly behind me. In an instant I realized I’d made a foolish mistake. Almost unbidden, a whistling tune sprang to my lips. I hiked on, loudly whistling one tune after another.
Whistling passed the graveyard? Maybe.
There’s a misconception about hiking in the Rocky Mountains. There’s a natural tendency to step softly: to attempt to disturb as little as possible the tranquility that is God’s playground.
That’s a mistake. It was the mistake that I made and for some, it has been a fatal mistake. While you might attempt to tread lightly in the forest, the forest won’t necessarily tread lightly back.
This is bear country. And unlike the Bernstein Bears, the ones here can be deadly.
Normally a bear, either a grizzly, black bear or brown bear, will avoid people. The polar bear is the only bear that will hunt humans as food. In fact, polar bears are the only animal of any species that will hunt humans. But, the rest of the bears will avoid humans. . .if they know you’re there.
It’s not complicated. You just have to do the opposite of what you would think would be the right thing. Instead of slipping through the forest as quiet as a Native American, you want to be as loud as an American traveling abroad. Whistle, sing, tell rude jokes. Anything to announce your presence.
Stores sell bells that you can attach to your pack that make a curious gingling sound as you walk.
Don’t get these. They are referred to as “dinner” bells. They make a curious sound because baby bear cubs find the sound curious. And they are called dinner bells, because mama will make a meal out of you if you get near her cubs.
So, enjoy the great outdoors. Just don’t be quiet about it.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
Tell your friends about this!
Rarely am I embarrassed while camping. I’ve been camping for 40 years off and on. Most recently in Utah but originally in Washington. Utah is a desert. Washington is closer to a rain forest. I got an eagle scout award in Washington. Although I haven’t camped there in years, I’ve ridden that bike enough, it’s second nature.
This week we are on an extended vacation in Yellowstone area of Western Wyoming. My family is camping with two other families from Washington. We rolled into the campground Saturday afternoon and quickly set up camp. We have seven total tents set up. Saturday night around midnight a massive Rocky Mountain thunderstorm rolled through. The thunder felt incredibly close. The rain pounded on our tent all night.
In the morning we awoke to a light drizzle and water inside the tents. But, not all the tents. Just the folks from Utah had water in our tents.the Washington people barely even had damp tent walls.
So, what happened? My nephew helped us dry out and move our tents.
You didn’t stake your rain fly. But the biggest problem was your group cloth.
What do you mean? They all had ground clothes.
Yeah, but you didn’t tuck it underneath.
I’ve never tucked the ground cloth under the tent. Ever. All those years growing up and camping in Washington I was doing it wrong.
If you leave the edge of the ground cloth exposed, it will catch the water and channel it under your tent. Some of our tents had at least a gallon or two of water under the tent.
I didn’t kown what to say. I could still ride that bike but someone just pointed out that it had gears.
What have You been doing wrong for years? Never stop learning.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
Tell your friends about this!
Give me a large enough lever and I will move the world.
-Archamedis
There are two things that are impossible: dribbling a football and keeping twelve year-old boys from tipping their chairs back. . .and I’m not sure about the football.
So, imagine my surprise when I not only got a group of 14 of them to stop, I got them to encourage and remind each other.
I love working with interns and new, fresh-out-of-college employees, They bring an enthusiasm that is difficult to describe. They also haven’t formed all their bad habits yet. They are teachable. Too often, what gets taught are the worst habits of the senior programmers.
When you’re new, you want to fit in. You typically recognize your lack of experience and work hard to STOP being noticed. If your engineering group has well established protocols and follows them, so will new employees. If your existing engineers take shortcuts and follow bad practices, so will the new guys.
It’s easier to set a culture than change one. However, if you do find you need to break some team’s bad habits, a combination of enlisting the team in your cause and peer pressure are a good start.
We had a problem at church with boys leaning backin their chairs. Well, the leaning wasn’t the real problem. This was.
See those broken pieces on the bottom? That’s what happens when twelve year-old boys lean back in their chairs at church. They look bad, they scratch the wood floors and they have to be replaced. All because people, often twelve year-old boys lean their chairs back.
We had tried getting them to stop in the past. “Four on the floor” was something you might hear a leader say. But the reminders really only changed behavior for a couple of minutes. Then they were right back to balancing on two legs. One day I took a different approch. I took three of the worst looking ones and set them on a table where the boys could see them when they walked in. I explained how much it cost to repair them and I pointed out that the boys themselves were causing it.
The room got kind of quiet. I asked if they thought we should all agree to not lean back? They agreed that was a good idea. And that was it. No more lecture. Amazingly, it worked. We no longer had a problem with tipping chairs. Even more surprising, was the next week when a boy attended who’d missed our lesson the previous week. No sooner did he sit down, then he started tipping his chair. Before I could say anything, one of the other boys beat me too it.
We don’t tip our chairs in here.
No. No, we dont. Peer pressure: it’s great when it’s on your side.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
Tell your friends about this!
It was the beep that caught my attention. I was deep in the heart of a hardware store looking for toilet shims of all things. As I scanned the wall of all this G’s toilet related, I heard it again. A beep that sounded almost like a cell phone ringer. As I moved forward it stopped. I moved backwards and there it was again. And then I noticed the video monitor. It showed me standing in front of a wall of tools. I was on TV!
The tools didn’t seem to have anything to do with toilets so I wasn’t interested in them at first.
It, knowing they were valuable enough to warrant a video surveillance camera, I was intrigued. We’re these valuable tools? Might I need these tools? If I were a thief, would the surveillance make me more likely or less to steal these? They must be valuable, right?
Tools that I would have never given a second glance o, now suddenly seemed important to me.
Ho2 interesting that so.etimez all we need to do to make something or someONE feel valuable, is focus some attention on them.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
Tell your friends about this!
I’ll let you in on a secret about IT. We are lazy. Many of the innovations and really cool features on your computer systems were put there because an IT guy, a programmer, was too lazy and didn’t want to keep doing a task. So, he built a tool.
I used to play Dungean Seige, a PC based game. It’s your basic fantasy role playing game. You walk around killing monsters, collecting treasure and gathering stuff that lets you kill even bigger monsters. Your character can carry a certain amount of stuff. Typically is far more stuff than an actual person could carry. For example, you might be carrying two sets of armor, three swords, a bow, and some of that blue stuff that you drink and it makes you able to do magic. If you can’t carry more stuff, you have to go stash your stuff in a chest. Then, you can continue collecting even more armor and swords and blue magic stuff. Anyway, a new version came out that included a donkey. You could load up the donkey with even more stuff. The reason the donkey was added to the game, is that one of the programmers got tired of having his character constantly walking back to his house to drop all his loot in his chest.
Lazy.
We aren’t just lazy when it comes to games. We are lazy in our professional lives too. Nowhere do you see this more than when it comes to backups. Ask a computer tech when the last time he backed up his hard drive and you’ll get an uncomfortable look as he quickly changes the subject to talk about Dungean Seige strategies.
So, a couple of years ago, I finally decided that I should start practicing what I preach. I decided to back up my stuff. Being an IT guy, I wanted to make this as easy as possible. I bought a program called Pogoplug. It included a piece of hardware that attached to my home network, with an external hard drive attached. I installed the Pogoplug software on my computers and they started backing up everything to the local device and storing it online in the Pogoplug cloud. The Pogoplug device is very simple to use. If it has a green light, it’s working, if it has a red light there’s a problem.
Okay, great. I’m now backing up, and best of all, I don’t have to think about it much. By much, I mean I don’t have to think about it at all. The device sits on a shelf next to my computer desk. I can see it every time I walk to my office. If it turns red, I know I have to fix it. Nothing could be simpler.
Fast forward a couple of years. Yes, years. I don’t access my backups that often,. I’ve once again started to look at my backup options. I take a lot of pictures during scout outings and I’ve started sharing them through Dropbox. I paid Dropbox $100 and they gave me one terabyte of space. Since it is so easy to use and share Dropbox, I decided I would make it my main backup location. Moving the files, photos and music off my iPad and work laptop was pretty simple. My server, with it’s massive store of files, photos and music is currently in the computer repair shop, so I went to Pogoplug to get copies of my data to store on Dropbox. And that is when I discovered that forever isn’t very long. In fact, it’s about 2 years.
Pogoplug apparently realized a little more than a year ago that selling a piece of hardware to a customer once is a pretty limiting business model. They have discontinued their “free” online backup and replaced it with a subscription service. I understand perfectly that companies need to make money. Otherwise they don’t stay in business.
As I opened my Dropbox app, it informed me that my cloud based files were offline. But, it showed me that I had 147GB worth of them. For some reason my local store had the directory structure but no actual files. An email to support informed me that the period for recovering your online files had passed.My 147GB of files were no longer accessible.
What?
All is not lost. My server will eventually come back from the repair shop and I THINK it has copies of all of these files. But, the idea that a company would provide storage and then at some point simply cut off your access is a very bad business model.
I’ve sent additional emails to Pogoplug support asking them why my cloud store is still offline considering I have now subscribed to their paid service, and why does my online store show 147GB if my files are gone forever?
I’ve also asked them if there is a way to recover files from my local device.
Other than the single email informing me that I missed the “Hey, I’d kind of like to keep copies of these files I backed up” deadline, their support team has gone quite.
Yeah, I’m lazy. I’ll admit it. In fact, like most IT guys, I’m willing to go to a lot of work setting up systems to avoid doing the actual work involved in doing whatever my systems takes care of.
I will admit that it’s more than a little frustrating to go to the work of setting up a backup system so painless that I can ignore it for two years, safe in the false security of the green light and find out that some other IT guy made a change that nuked all of my files.
Oh, and by the way, I know you don’t come to this blog for technical advice, but if you are looking for a backup solution for your computers, I can recommend Dropbox. It’s inexpensive and easy to use. I would avoid Pogoplug if I where you. That is if you ever plan to actually retrieve your files.
I’ll let you know if I hear back from them.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
Tell your friends about this!
Hey, Dad, I’m thinking about quitting my job?
You’ve only been there a couple weeks. Why the change?
Well this guy who used work at the restaurant came in today. He’s selling security systems and he’s making $2000 per month. And he’s only sixteen, too.
Utah is full of people with sales experience. Most young men in the LDS Church go on a two year mission when they are 18. You’ve seen these missionaries. They wear white shirts and ties, with nametags that all have the same first name; Elder. Their entire two years is about engaging with people they’ve never met. The fact that they are teaching religious lessons doesn’t change the fact that what they are doing is very much like selling.
Like many salespeople, they have a pipeline. They have a method for gathering new contacts. They learn to commit those they teach, called investigators.
Don’t get me wrong. The message they are sharing is spiritually based and those who commit to join the church, are making a much more important decision than whether to buy a new car, or buy that set of children’s learning DVDs.
But, the concepts are the same. Those missionaries are from all over the world, but given Utah’s high Mormon population, many of them are from right here in the Rocky Mountains. When they finish their missionary service, they end up back in Utah going to school, starting families and getting jobs.
There are tons of sales jobs in Utah. We are the headquarters of many Multi-level Marketing, or MLM companies. Young men, and young women, take summer jobs selling around the country for satellite TV services, and security systems, and lawn services, and any number of other door to door sales jobs.
My son makes slightly better than minimum wage at his job as a cook at a local restaurant. The prospect of $2000 per month is huge for a sixteen year old. and he’d probably be good at it. Not as good as they tell him he could be, but then no one ever is.
I have friends who work in sales. My experience with sales was very limited. As president of a startup, I convinced 10 companies to put a 50% down payment on the software we were writing. The software was $10,000 per copy. My brother, a brilliant marketer asked me,
So, you sold software that didn’t exist yet and you got people to pay you $5,000 for it?
Apparently, I’m good at sales. I’m not in sales though. I have nothing against it, but it’s not my comfort zone. And it’s that way for many people. But, I’ve seen a tendency, especially among young people just starting out in business, to get excited about the “limitless” commissions. You set your own salary, right? You can earn an amount equal to the amount you want to work.
My son didn’t understand why everyone wasn’t in sales.
You just talk to people. It’s literally not that hard.
That’s the attitude that makes whole generations of Girl Scouts feel guilty for not selling more boxes of cookies. It’s the attitude that makes grade school kids uncomfortable when they realize they are not going to sell enough popcorn, or cookie dough, to get the bike. They don’t realize that no one ever gets the bike.
But, how do you convince a young person that everyone is not a natural salesperson? How do you make them feel okay with the fact that they would rather go to the dentist and take a midterm exam at the same time than talk to a stranger about buying a chocolate bar?
Aren’t they just being too afraid, and they should get over it?
All of my kids play musical instruments. They sing, or play the piano, trumpets, clarinets, flutes and a couple I’ve forgotten. They understand the more they practice the better they get. They also understand that it’s a skill and that some are more gifted than others.
Sales is like music.
There is nothing about the selling process that resembles learning to play the piano, except maybe practice. But the idea that some people have an affinity for music, is a concept that my kids can understand.
Some people have an affinity for sales. They are natural salesmen and women. And that’s great, because we need salespeople. But, just because my friend went into sales, loved it and made a ton of money, I don’t need to feel bad. I don’t need to feel like there is something wrong with me because I don’t relish the idea of earning my living off commission. I can watch a talented musician and I understand what what he’s doing on the piano. But, just because I understand it, doesn’t mean I can replicate it.
My son, started to get it. I could see the realization as he considered the idea that sales is simply another skill. Some are good at it. Some can become good at it. And some should stick to making tortillas at the restaurant.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
Tell your friends about this!
It’s a silly tradition. Every July 4th I send a message to my good friend who lives in Scotland.
Happy “Remember When My Ancestors Beat Your Ancestors In A War” day.
It’s a holiday here in the United States. A pretty important one at that. July 4th is Independence Day. The day we celebrate the birth of a nation. Only July 4th, 1776 a group of men in Philadelphia met and signed a document declaring the former British colonies would no longer be governed by Britain. We declared ourselves free and independent states.
It’s one thing to declare you are free and quite another to actually achieve it. Four years later, the most improbable of beginnings resulted in the formation of the United States of America. I have ancestors who fought in that war, just as my good friend has ancestors who fought on the other side. After 240 years, the genealogies are so mixed and muddled that I probably have ancestors that fought on the British side as well. Considering that my mother’s paternal grandfather was German, I may have ancestors who were the hired mercenaries for the British as well.
July 4th is such an important holiday in America that it’s one of the almost “required” days off. If your company offers any paid days off, July 4th is one of them. Today it’s on a Monday, but if it falls on a weekend as it did last year, the company still give you either the Friday before or the Monday after as a holiday.
If your company only works and deals with US customers, employees and suppliers then today is pretty much a full stop day. No one is working. It might as well still be Sunday. But, increasingly, that’s not how the world works. My company, for example, has it’s international headquarters in France. (We like the French, they helped us beat the British all those years ago.) Today, it’s Monday in France. Just the start of another work week. We have offices all over the world. I got an email this morning from a coworker in the Philipines who has completed a report showing the system availability for the month of June. He sent me the final report this morning. At least I think he’s in the Philipines. He might be in India. I’m not really sure. I work and talk with him often, but email knows no nationality. In the Philipines it’s just Monday and the day is nearly over.
So, here in America, we are taking the day off to enjoy BBQ and fireworks and for those with a little knowledge of history, a remembrance of men and women long dead who carved out a new nation. But, in the rest of the world it’s just a Monday.
To my friends in “the colonies,” happy Independance Day. To my friends in the rest of the world, happy Monday.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
Tell your friends about this!
Several years ago I was working in a very stressful job.
I loved my work, but there was just one problem, my manager. He was a new manager. . And he REALLY liked being a manager.
The famous singer/songwriter Billy Joel was once asked why he wrote a song early in his career called “Rootbear Rag.” It’s an upbeat, jazzy instrumental. He played a bit of it for his audience before he finally said,
I remember why I wrote this. I had this Moog synthesizer. In fact, if you listen you can hear this Moog synthesizer sort of peeing all over everything.
He had a new toy and he wanted to use it. He quickly learned that rather than make a synthesizer sound like a piano, it was probably better to simply play a piano. But, the point was that he overused his new instrument simply because he could.
New managers are often like that. In fact, say the following to anyone who’s been in business for more than five years and watch their reaction.
I got a new boss. . .he’s a first time manager.
At the first statement you’ll see mild indifference. At the second, you’ll see a sympathetic, knowing look. We’ve all had them and those of us in management have all been that new manager.
Good judgment comes from experience
Experience comes from poor judgement
If a new manager understands his limitations, understands his inexperience, he has a chance of doing well. “Managing up” is just as important a skill as “managing down.” Senior employees will help the new manager to learn the ropes and like a brand new Army 2nd LT, if they will listen to their sergeants, they’ll do fine. The problems shows up when the new 2nd LT decides that since he outranks the non-coms, he must be smarter or know more.
That was the manager I had. My job was largely autonomous. I’d been doing it for a year and had pretty good success. This new manager decided that despite my success, I was doing it wrong.
It’s not your fault Rodney. You weren’t trained properly, but that’s really not the way we do things here.
Mostly, I simply ignored him. I knew how to do my job and I figured he would eventually either learn or leave, I didn’t care which. At one point he pulled me aside,
I noticed you were away from your desk for 3 hours on Friday. Where were you?
Did you need to get hold of me for something?
No, I just didn’t see you online.
I worked from our Everett office on Friday. I’m not sure what I was doing during those three hours actually.
Well, I also called Mark. I noticed on your calendar that you were scheduled to be in his meeting at 2:00 and I wanted to see if you attended.
The rest of the conversation took place at HR, by my request. Turns out he really didn’t understand how offensive it was to call around and check up on me like some wife calling the bar looking for a wayward husband.
The job didn’t change, but my satisfaction did. I eventually left for a position that I enjoyed less, but working for a manager that I trusted more.
People leave companies for a single reason. They often get burnt out for the same reason. If you are the manager, it’s not necessarily because you are the smartest, or the most knowledgable. Sometimes he manages best who manages least.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
Tell your friends about this!
The guy was just about to put the ball in play when my phone rang. It was at the opposite end of the court.
Give me, a minute. I’ll be right back.
The guys I play basketball with don’t stop for much of anything. We once had a guy nearly knocked out by by the pain of a broken nose that he got running into someone’s shoulder. He laid on the court for a few minutes and then hobbled off to the sidelines while we kept playing. (Honestly, he said he was feeling okay, and we were at a really important point in the game.)
This morning’s game had just gotten underway when my phone interrupted. We play Tuesday and Friday mornings from 6:00am to 7:30am. The games are to 21 by ones and twos. Call your own fouls, and inbound at the top of the key. This morning we had eight guys: four on four. As I made my way to the sideline the game continued with seven. If you have ten guys and lose one, you can play five on four pretty well. In fact, the team with four guys wins more often than not. However, four on three is really tough to do.
I knew as soon as I saw the number that I was not going back in the game.
Rodney, come on, we need you. We’re getting killed here.
Nope, sorry. I’m done.
I swiped the ANSWER button a little harder than necessary.
Hi, this is Rodney. What’s broken?
And so started my fourth or fifth day in a row with system outages. Honestly I’ve lost track. I drove home and rather than head to my shower to clean off, I went straight to my office and logged in. Three hours later the call was complete and I finally could get ready for the day. It was a fairly typical day. However, we had a system change that I had to dial into a call for at 9:30pm. Then, I had another system change that started at midnight and ran until 4:00am. Six thirty AM to 4:00AM makes for a long day. I went in a little late on Wednesday. My phone rang on the way to work with more questions.
Last weekend I had a family reunion. For four days I got to hang out with my brothers and mother, my kids and grandkids and nieces and nephews. We had a great time. I only took five or six work calls during the weekend. My boss worries about me getting burned out. I’ve thought a lot about that. There’s a difference between burnt out and just tired.
I like my job. I really do. I work with great people. I enjoy the client. I like the fact that I get to be technical and also get to fix things and build interesting projects. My job is very demanding and takes a lot of attention to detail and a lot of hours. It’s been like this since I started two and a half years ago.
Am I getting burnt out? How would I know? What can I do to prevent it?
Burnt out, I think means you just don’t care any more. My lovely wife and I once worked with a social worker who really wasn’t interested in helping our kids. He did the minimum amount necessary to make sure they were safe, but he wasn’t interested in doing the extra work needed to make sure they got the services they needed to overcome the problems that landed them in foster care. He was burnt out. He didn’t much like hearing from us. We pushed him to get help for our kids.
Eventually, they were assigned a new social worker who was the most dynamic woman I’d ever met. She was incredibly busy. Much busier than the first guy. And yet, she jumped in immediately and started getting services set up for our kids that would help them get better. She was sometimes tired, but definitely not burnt out.
I considered my own situation. I’m excited to be working through some of the challenges that our project at work has. I felt honest excitement yesterday when one of our engineers finally found a bug that was affecting our ability to record calls. We’d been chasing it for a month and he finally fixed it. I have a business trip coming up next month that will conflict with a Boy Scout rafting trip that my boys and our troop are planning. I’m disappointed that I don’t get to go to Moab, UT with the boys and go whitwater rafting, but I’m excited to be back in Louisianna and launching a new line of business.
I don’t think hard work is what burns out employees. At least it doesn’t for me, or the social worker that helped my kids Sure, I’m tired and I’m excited to be taking some time off next week to go to Yellowstone with my family. But, I’m equally excited to be coming back after that trip and jump into our summer projects at work.
So, if working hard doesn’t burn out employees, what does?
Maybe I’ll write about that tomorrow.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved